Where is the mind awareness, of an end stage Alzheimers sufferer?

[Alan McDougall]

Where is the mind/consciousness/awarenes of an end- stage Alzheimer Sufferer?

I have long thought about exactly where the mind/soul/consciousness of an end stage Alzheimer sufferer, where the person has become so incapacitated that they are zombie like and comatose and for all purposes appear to be a body from which the awareness has already left, but cannot be diagnosed as brain dead.

The degradation of the mind due to Alzheimer's disease suggests that the mind and, resultantly, the human consciousness is a transient thing..

 

Is the consciousness of the victims of end state Alzheimer's sufferer, still somewhere in their diseased brains?

The mind might not survive without a functioning human body. Does an eternal soul live on? If the consciousness dies then the thing that makes you an individual, self-aware human might have already ceased, while your body cannot be diagnosed as brain dead.

As the disease progresses the Alzheimer's victim goes through anger, rage, violence, depression, regressing to childhood, forgetting current life, almost living in a “past life”' state. as 5 year old child. as a teen or young adult, in random stages of this disease.

We can learn from experience of those who are in the process of descending into the black hole Alzheimer's, which is probably one of the best source of information about Alzheimer's disease.

A satisfactory solution would be of great help and comfort to the family and to those still in the first stages Alzheimer's, could medical science somehow find a means to establish where the person still lives on in the brain ?

 

Is this one case in which active euthanasia might be a real option, to help the family looking on and the person who might be locked into some unimaginable nightmare.

 

Speaking for myself if I ever ended up to all purposes a zombie like stranger to my beloved family members and friend, if I could I would insist on active euthanasia, to free me and them from further distress and suffering.

An internet friend wrote about his personal experience with a friend who died of end stage Alzheimer’s

I just watched a friend die of Alzheimer's. It took about 5 years and his wife is still recovering after two years of continuous care for him.

One of the things that each of us will have to face is that there is no known way to prevent senile dementia. It begins with minor loss of memory as our older neurons begin to die off and not get replaced. It then proceeds until things stop working permanently. We have no way as yet to prevent this. Of course at the same time various body parts cease their function, which at least is a diversion.

My guess is that the entire dying sequence that goes through one of the dementia, whether from Alzheimer's or the slower normal dementia, or from a terrible disease that causes a coma, or any other problem that denies function, will be about the same for the awareness of the person. I watched people with various degrees of mental impairment - actually, half a jug of rum comes pretty close to the dementia - and my impression is that the same person still lives in the shell, but is responding to new and unfamiliar stimuli.

A quick review of people taking delirium chemicals suggests that at death there is an interruption of the flow of rational consciousness, does this happen before clinical death in the case of an end stage Alzheimer sufferer.

Edited by me Alan, to shorten!